Beatles' Yellow Submarine remastered and reissued

The Beatles movie Yellow Submarine has been hand restored frame-by-frame for
release later this year.

The Beatles' Yellow SubmarinePhoto: Rex Features

By Telegraph staff

9:41AM GMT 22 Mar 2012

The animated adventure, first seen in 1968, tells the psychedelic story of the Beatles, posing as Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, as they travel to a city under the sea to confront the music hating Blue Meanies.

Directed by George Dunning, the film has been out of print for years but will resurface on DVD and Blue-ray on 28 May. The reissue will include audio commentary, a making-of documentary, and a meticulous restoration of the original cartoon.

Restorers chose not to use automatic software to tidy up the original film because of the "delicate nature" of the hand-drawn artwork. Instead a team at Triage Motion Picture Services and Eque Inc worked for four months to clean each frame individually.

The repackaged "songtrack" album - which features songs from the film, rather than the score which takes up much of the original Yellow Submarine - will also be reissued on 28 May.

The releases were announced by The Beatles' company Apple.

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Pixar studios chief John Lasseter, writing in the sleeve notes for the re-release, says: "As a fan of animation and as a film-maker, I tip my hat to the artists of Yellow Submarine, whose revolutionary work helped pave the way for the fantastically diverse world of animation that we all enjoy today."

Ahead of Yellow Submarine's CD and DVD release, Candlewick Press will publish a book of the screenplay on 24 April. A digital version of the book is already available.